Word: nams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...strangeness of Viet Nam to freshly arrived U.S. troops and the frustrations of guerrilla warfare do not adequately explain My Lai. In March of 1968, most members of C Company of the Americal Division's 11th Infantry Brigade had never been tested in direct combat with any large numbers of the enemy. Trained together in Hawaii, they had been in Viet Nam only one month. Yet as part of Task Force Barker, their assignment in March was a fearsome one: to clear the Viet Cong out of Quang Ngai province?an area long known as "the cradle of revolution...
Although it sounded "fishy," he asked no further questions. Nor did anyone else, it seems, until a troubled Viet Nam veteran, who had served with many of the men at Charlie Company, wrote his now-famous letters to some 30 Washington officials, including the President, the Sec retary of Defense and ? most important ? key Congressmen...
...military activities. Although no one can be sure, the chances are that no other atrocity of comparable scope has taken place in Viet Nam. But inevitably, the My Lai revelation has started a flood of other horror stories. Dozens of journalists, soldiers and visitors to Viet Nam have begun to recall other incidents of U.S. brutality. Individual acts of senseless ?sometimes gleeful?killing of civilians by U.S. troops apparently happened often enough to be deeply disturbing...
Terry Reid, 22, a former infantryman in the same Americal Division, claimed last week that he counted "60 dead bodies?women, children and maybe a few old and decrepit men" after U.S. troops had shot up a village 130 miles south of My Lai in early 1968. A Viet Nam veteran at Fort Benning, Ga., who would not give his name said he and other G.I.s had taken three Viet Cong prisoners up in a helicopter. "We told them to talk or we'd throw them out. The first guy wouldn't talk, so we tossed him out. The second...
...important to remember that the U.S. in Viet Nam faces an unusually brutal enemy who uses terror deliberately (see box, page 29). But that certainly is no excuse for American behavior at My Lai. It is also small comfort to the U.S. that other Western nations have been guilty of wartime atrocities. The French executed some 15,000 Moslems in the long Algerian war of the 1950s. At Amritsar in India's Punjab, British Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched 50 of his soldiers toward a menacing mob of Indians in 1919 and, without warning, they killed 379 people with rifle...